DOCSLIB.ORG

Cushitic) Yvonne Treis

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Cushitic) Yvonne Treis Polysemous agent nominals in Kambaata (Cushitic) Yvonne Treis To cite this version: Yvonne Treis. Polysemous agent nominals in Kambaata (Cushitic). STUF, Akademie Verlag, 2011, 64 (4), pp.369-381. halshs-00717269 HAL Id: halshs-00717269 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00717269 Submitted on 12 Jul 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Published 2011in: Luschützky, Hans-Christian & Franz Rainer (eds.) 2011. Agent-noun polysemy in a cross-linguistic perspective. Special issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 64, 4: 369-381 [This is a pre-publication version. Please quote the final published version.] YVONNE TREIS (La Trobe University) Polysemous Agent Nominals in Kambaata (Cushitic)* Kambaata has a morpheme -aan with which agent nominals can be derived from verbs and nouns. The present article discusses, firstly, the morphological and syntactic characteristics of -aan nominals and the specific problem of which word class they should be assigned to. Secondly, it is shown that the -aan morpheme is multifunctional. Apart from agent nominals, it is used to derive instrument, place and patient nominals. 1. Introduction Kambaata belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum, more precisely to the Highland East Cushitic (HEC) language group. The hitherto little documented language is spoken by more than 600,000 speakers in an area approximately 300 km south-west of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The lan- guage has a robust noun-verb distinction and a (sub-)word class of adjectives.1 Kambaata is strictly suffixing and has a rich verbal and nominal morphology. One of its derivational morphemes, the agentive morpheme -aan, productively gener- ates agent nominals on the basis of verbs. In the present article, the formal features (section 2) as well as the meaning and use of -aan nominals (section 3) are dis- cussed. In a language without a documented history, agent nominals can only be analysed in a synchronic perspective.2 The present work is intended to supplement the vast literature on agentive derivations that is predominantly concerned with Indo-European languages. This study is based on a corpus of spontaneously pro- duced recorded data, elicited data and data from written sources. In addition, pub- lished works are consulted. First examples for derived agent nominals in Kambaata are given in LESLAU (1952, 1956), HUDSON (1976) and SHELEME (1989). Though sketchy, these previous works already point to some of the important features of * Research for this paper was supported in part by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemein- schaft (DFG) and by a La Trobe Post-doctoral Research Fellowship; this support is gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to my consultants Tessema Handiso and Deginet Wotango. Thanks are also due to Abeba Matewos, Getahun Hellebo, Berhanu Erango, Getahun Jorga, Ermias Hiri- go and Mulugeta Eyoel for replying to my questionnaire. I am grateful to Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1 As argued in TREIS (2008: 81-97), Kambaata has four open word classes: nouns, verbs, attributes (with the sub-word classes adjectives, numerals and demonstratives) and ideophones/interjections. 2 The earliest lexical account of Xambaaro, a Kambaata dialect, is BORELLI (1890). The very first grammatical information on Kambaata is provided in CERULLI (1925) and MORENO (1939). the -aan morpheme and its derivates. All HEC languages share a cognate “agentive suffix” (HUDSON 1976: 273f). 2. Form The Kambaata agent nominal has the following morphological structure: STEM-aan-NUMBER-CASE(-GENDER) Though deverbal agent nominals are much more common (1), it was noted as early as in LESLAU (1952: 351) that -aan is also attached to nominal bases (2).3 (1) kiil-aan-ch-ú ‘magician’ (L52: 351)4 < kiil- ‘do magic’ kaas-aan-ch-ú ‘planter’ (K8: 8) < kaas- ‘plant’ amma’nn-aan-ch-ú ‘believer’ < amma’nn- ‘believe’ raga’-aan-ch-ú ‘heir’ < raga’- ‘inherit’ zaakkoot-aan-ch-ú-ta ‘alcohol trader (F)’ < zaakkoot- ‘trade alcohol’ (2) lokk-aan-ch-ú ‘pedestrian’ (L52: 351) < lokk-á-ta ‘foot’ qomaax-aan-n-ú ‘lepers’ (K8: 47) < qomaax-á ‘leprosy’5 maz-aan-ch-ú ‘wounded person’ (K5: 9) < maz-á-ta ‘wound’ Verbal bases of agent nominals may be bare roots (3) or extended verbs, i.e. causa- tive (4-5), middle (6), passive (7) or reciprocal stems (8). In rare cases, agent nomi- nals are derivates of compound stems (9). Complex nominal stems are not attested as the input of the agentive derivation. (3) ros-aan-ch-ú ‘student’ < ros- ‘learn’ (4) ros-is-aan-ch-ú ‘teacher’ < ros-is- ‘cause to learn’ (5) il-siis-aan-ch-ú-ta ‘midwife’ (F) < il-siis- ‘cause to give birth’ (6) uucc-aqq-aan-chú ‘beggar’ < uucc-aqq- ‘beg for one’s benefit’ (7) xa’mm-am-aan-ch-ú ‘person questioned’ < xa’mm-am- ‘be asked’ (K8: 55) (8) beeqq-am-aan-ch-ú ‘participant’ < beeqq-am- ‘participate’ (K8: 28) (9) giir-qas-aan-ch-ú ‘bonfire’ < giir-á-ta ‘fire’ + qas- ‘pierce’ 3 The morpheme -aan is only rarely attested on adjectival stems (Treis 2008: 268, 282). Kambaata thus confirms DRESSLER’s cline of the preferred bases of agent noun formation: verb > noun > adjective (DRESSLER 1986: 524). Due to the lack of reliable data, however, de-adjectival derivates are excluded from the present analysis. 4 Kambaata examples cited from earlier works (LESLAU 1952, 1956; SHELEME 1989; HUDSON 1976, 1989; BERHANU 1986) are adjusted to the official Kambaata orthography (MAATEWOOS 1992; TREIS 2008: 73-79) to enable easier comparison of the examples. In addition to this, stress is marked and, if necessary, the transcription of these data is corrected. 5 The base noun is an Amharic loan. Interestingly, Amharic ቈመጣ qwämat’a designates the patient (‘leper’), while the disease is referred to by the derived noun ቈመጣ qwəmt’ənna ‘leprosy’ (KANE 1990: 708f). The agentive morpheme is obligatorily followed by at least two morphemes, the first one being a number morpheme. The singulative morpheme -ch marks singular reference. The form with a doubled stem-final consonant is used for plural refer- ence (10).6 Number morphemes precede case suffixes, e.g. the morpheme -ú, which marks the accusative on masculine agent nominals.7 When the agent nominal has a feminine referent, the gender marker -ta is added in the accusative; see (5). (10) mogga’-aan-ch-ú(-ta) M.SG (F.SG) ‘thief’ / mogga’-aan-n-ú PL ‘thieves’ Agent nominals share morphological and syntactic features with nouns, verbs and adjectives. As phrasal heads, agent nominals inflect like nouns and distinguish as many case forms as the latter do: accusative, nominative, genitive, dative, ablative, instrumental-comitative-perlative, locative and oblique (TREIS 2008: 103). In (11), the first agent nominal is ablative-marked as the head of the standard NP, the sec- ond agent nominal is nominative-marked as the head of the subject NP. Like nouns, agent nominals can be modified by genitive nouns (12) and adjectives (13). (11) xah-í dimb-aan-n-íichch seel-í dimb-áan-ch-u woyy-áno word-M.GEN be:drunk-AAN-PL-M.ABL beer-M.GEN be:drunk-AAN-SG-M.NOM be:better-3M.IPV A beer drunkard is better than word drunkards. [Proverb] (12) mixaad-í (M.GEN) shiinsh-aan-ch-ú ‘griddle wiper’ < shiinsh- ‘wipe’ haraqé (F.GEN) ag-aan-n-ú ‘spirits drinkers’ < ag- ‘drink’ maganzeeb-ó (F.GEN) moos-aan-n-ú ‘patients of the rainbow [disease]’ < moos- ‘be(come) sick’ (13) woyy-á lallab-aan-ch-ú ‘better orator’ < lallab- ‘speak in public’ hoolam-á zazzal-aan-n-ú ‘many traders’ < zazzal- ‘trade’ Although they are to a certain extent noun-like, deverbal agent nominals reflect (“inherit”) the argument structure of their verbal bases. Like verbs, they are able to govern objects (14). Though commonly modified by adjectives (13), they may also be modified by adverbs (15). (14) maal-á (ACC) it-áan-ch-o (K4: 33) ‘[you] meat eater’ oddishsh-á-ta (ACC) gob-aan-ch-ú (H89: 148) ‘tailor’ [lit. “clothes sewer”] jeechch-ú-ta (ACC) abbis-aan-ch-ú (K4: 18) ‘punctual person’ [lit. “time re- specter”] (15) […] danáam-o-ga xawaaqq-aan-ch-ú ass-íi dand-áno good-M.OBL-ADV speak-AAN-SG-M.ACC do-M.DAT be:able-3M.IPV [A sound rhetorical education] can produce a good [lit. “well”] speaker. Deverbal agent nominals are even capable of governing more or less elaborate sub- 8 ordinate clauses; see the converb clauses preceding the agent nominals in (16-18). 6 K’abeena and Alaaba, Kambaata’s closest relatives, have slightly different plural forms: -aan-ú in K’abeena (CRASS 2005: 73) and -aan-ú-ta in Alaaba (SCHNEIDER-BLUM 2007: 147). 7 The accusative case form is also the citation form. 8 Consult SCHNEIDER-BLUM (2007: 147, ex. 411) for an Alaaba example in which an agent nominal is modified by a converb. Rather than just taking verbal stems as its basis, the -aan morpheme can be consid- ered as being attached to a complete (more or less complex) verb phrase (cf. DRESSLER 1986: 522), including objects and adverbial constituents such as converb clauses, as indicated by the square brackets in the first lines of (16)-(18).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Designing a Rule Based Stemming Algorithm for Kambaata Language Text
    Jonathan Samuel & Solomon Teferra Designing A Rule Based Stemming Algorithm for Kambaata Language Text Jonathan Samuel [email protected] Telecom Excellence Academy/ Digital Learning Ethio Telecom Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Solomon Teferra [email protected] Faculty of Informatics/ School of Information Science Addis Ababa University Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Abstract Stemming is the process of reducing inflectional and derivational variants of a word to its stem. It has substantial importance in several natural language processing applications. In this research, a rule based stemming algorithm that conflates Kambaata word variants has been designed for the first time. The algorithm is a single pass, context-sensitive, and longest-matching designed by adapting rule-based stemming approach. Several studies agree that Kambaata is strictly suffixing language with a rich morphology and word formations mostly relying on suffixation; even though its word formation involves infixation, compounding, blending and reduplication as well. The output of this study is a context-sensitive, longest-match stemming algorithm for Kambaata words. To evaluate the stemmer’s effectiveness, error counting method was applied. A test set of 2425 distinct words was used to evaluate the stemmer. The output from the stemmer indicates that out of 2425 words, 2349 words (96.87%) were stemmed correctly, 63 words (2.60%) were over stemmed and 13 words (0.54%) were under stemmed. What is more, a dictionary reduction of 65.86% has also been achieved during evaluation. The main factor for errors in stemming Kambaata words is the language’s rich and complex morphology. Hence several errors can be corrected by exploring more rules.
    [Show full text]
  • Similative Morphemes As Purpose Clause Markers in Ethiopia and Beyond Yvonne Treis
    Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond Yvonne Treis To cite this version: Yvonne Treis. Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond. Yvonne Treis; Martine Vanhove. Similative and Equative Constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, 117, John Benjamins, pp.91-142, 2017, Typological Studies in Language, ISBN 9789027206985. hal-01351924 HAL Id: hal-01351924 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01351924 Submitted on 4 Aug 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond Yvonne Treis LLACAN (CNRS, INALCO, Université Sorbonne Paris-Cité) Abstract In more than 30 languages spoken at the Horn of Africa, a similative morpheme ‘like’ or a noun ‘manner’ or ‘type’ is used as a marker of purpose clauses. The paper first elaborates on the many functions of the enclitic morpheme =g ‘manner’ in Kambaata (Highland East Cushitic), which is used, among others, as a marker of the standard in similative and equative comparison (‘like’, ‘as’), of temporal clauses of immediate anteriority (‘as soon as’), of complement clauses (‘that’) and, most notably, of purpose clauses (‘in order to’).
    [Show full text]
  • Polysemous Agent Nominals in Kambaata (Cushitic)*
    Author manuscript, published in "Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 64, 4 (2011) 369-381" Published 2011in: Luschützky, Hans-Christian & Franz Rainer (eds.) 2011. Agent-noun polysemy in a cross-linguistic perspective. Special issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 64, 4: 369-381 [This is a pre-publication version. Please quote the final published version.] YVONNE TREIS (La Trobe University) Polysemous Agent Nominals in Kambaata (Cushitic)* Kambaata has a morpheme -aan with which agent nominals can be derived from verbs and nouns. The present article discusses, firstly, the morphological and syntactic characteristics of -aan nominals and the specific problem of which word class they should be assigned to. Secondly, it is shown that the -aan morpheme is multifunctional. Apart from agent nominals, it is used to derive instrument, place and patient nominals. 1. Introduction Kambaata belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum, more precisely to the Highland East Cushitic (HEC) language group. The hitherto little documented language is spoken by more than 600,000 speakers in an area approximately 300 km south-west of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The lan- guage has a robust noun-verb distinction and a (sub-)word class of adjectives.1 Kambaata is strictly suffixing and has a rich verbal and nominal morphology. One of its derivational morphemes, the agentive morpheme -aan, productively gener- ates agent nominals on the basis of verbs. In the present article, the formal features (section 2) as well as the meaning and use of -aan nominals (section 3) are dis- cussed. In a language without a documented history, agent nominals can only be analysed in a synchronic perspective.2 The present work is intended to supplement the vast literature on agentive derivations that is predominantly concerned with Indo-European languages.
    [Show full text]
  • Similative Morphemes As Purpose Clause Markers in Ethiopia and Beyond Yvonne Treis
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Archive Ouverte a LUniversite Lyon 2 Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond Yvonne Treis To cite this version: Yvonne Treis. Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond. 2016. <hal-01351924> HAL Id: hal-01351924 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01351924 Submitted on 4 Aug 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destin´eeau d´ep^otet `ala diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publi´esou non, lished or not. The documents may come from ´emanant des ´etablissements d'enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche fran¸caisou ´etrangers,des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou priv´es. Similative morphemes as purpose clause markers in Ethiopia and beyond Yvonne Treis LLACAN (CNRS, INALCO, Université Sorbonne Paris-Cité) Abstract In more than 30 languages spoken at the Horn of Africa, a similative morpheme ‘like’ or a noun ‘manner’ or ‘type’ is used as a marker of purpose clauses. The paper first elaborates on the many functions of the enclitic morpheme =g ‘manner’ in Kambaata (Highland East Cushitic), which is used, among others, as a marker of the standard in similative and equative comparison (‘like’, ‘as’), of temporal clauses of immediate anteriority (‘as soon as’), of complement clauses (‘that’) and, most notably, of purpose clauses (‘in order to’).
    [Show full text]
  • Implemented Stemming Algorithms for Six Ethiopian Languages
    International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology Vol. 29, No. 7, (2020), pp. 2532-2536 Implemented Stemming Algorithms for Six Ethiopian Languages Wubetu Barud Demilie Department of Information Technology, Wachemo University, Hossana, Ethiopia, P.O. Box 667 [email protected] or [email protected] Abstract Text stemming is an exploratory process of removing suffixes, infixes and sometimes prefixes from words to arrive at the base word. It is one of the pipeline features of most Natural Language Processing Applications (NLPAs) and commonly used in natural language processing (NLP) and in text mining. The main problems of developing stemming are to identify and remove any kind of affixes since all the six languages those I have selected for analysis have different characteristics, sentence structures and grammatical rules. This paper tries to analysis different approaches that have been implemented by different researchers or scholars of the selected languages accordingly. I have discussed the type of stemming approaches, an overview of the available and the most popular used stemmers for selected languages and brief analysis between discussed stemmers as well as their evaluation results and analysis of available stemmers on the languages experimentally. Based on the analysis study and experiment, I have concluded and recommended the final results of the stemmer for the languages. Keywords: Affix, Analysis, Approach, Ethiopian Language, Natural Language Processing Application, Stemming Approaches. I. INTRODUCTION In information retrieval processes, stems help to advance the process of natural language processes accordingly. For example, in information retrieval processing systems, it has the ability to index documents based on topics, and to expand a query to obtain more accurate and precise results clearly.
    [Show full text]
  • Presentative Demonstratives in Kambaata
    Presentative demonstratives in Kambaata Yvonne Treis1 Paper presented at the 22nd Afrikanistentag 17-18 June 2016, Humbold-Universität, Berlin 1. Introduction Afroasiatic < Cushitic < East Cushitic < Highland East Cushitic < Kambaata Number of speakers: > 600,000 (Census 2007) Speaker area: Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPR), Kambaata- Xambaaro Zone Sociolinguistic status: medium of instruction in primary school, taught as a subject up to grade 8, hardly any written material (schoolbooks, Gospel of John, some brochures with a limited distribution), local Kambaata radio program Official orthography: Latin-based orthography following the Oromo writing conventions (Treis 2008: 73-80)2 Official orthography with minor adaptions also used in this paper Data on which this contribution is based: collected or verified in February-March 2016,3 from a variety of sources (recordings, elicitation, written sources) Starting point: (1) Aayíchch daqqan-teenánta y-itáa-’e bagáan Mum.fNOM meet.REC-2pIPV say-3fIPV-1sO CONTR kú’nn daqqam-mu’nnáan kabar-ée iill-íneemm meet.REC-1pNCO today-mDAT reach-1pPVE (From a letter in which a boy writes to his unknown half-brother) ‘Mum used to tell me “You will meet (one day)” but – Look! – we haven’t met up to today.’ [K89: 8.21] The independent morpheme kú’nn has been analyzed as an invariant interjection/discourse particle. This paper shows that kú’nn belongs to a (fairly elaborate) paradigm of presentative demonstratives that has been overlooked in earlier analyses of the language. 1 Affiliation: CSPC, INALCO CNRS UMR 8135 LLACAN Langage, langues et cultures d’Afrique noire 2 The following graphemes are not in accordance with the IPA conventions: <ph> /p’/, <x> /t’/, <q> /k’/, <j> /dʒ/, <c> /tʃ’/, <ch> /tʃ/, <sh> /ʃ/, <y> /j/ and <’> /Ɂ/.
    [Show full text]
  • Volltext Als
    Afrikanistik online 2006, http://www.afrikanistik-online.de/archiv/2006/379 Form and Function of Case Marking in Kambaata Yvonne Treis (Köln) Zusammenfassung Die kuschitische Sprache Kambaata zeichnet sich durch eine reiche nominale Morphologie aus. So unterscheidet sie acht verschiedene Kasus an Nomina und Pronomina: Akkusativ, Nominativ, Genitiv, Dativ, Ablativ, Instrumental-Komitativ-Perlativ, Lokativ I und II. Kasus wird nicht nur durch (segmentale) Suffixe, sondern auch durch eine bestimmte Position des Wortakzents (suprasegmental) gekennzeichnet. Der erste Teil des Artikels widmet sich diesen formalen Regeln der Kasusbildung und diskutiert im Detail die Deklinationen von Nomina und Eigennamen, die Kasusmarkierung an nominalen Modifikatoren und Personal-, Demonstrativ- und Interrogativpronomen. Adjektive, Zahlwörter und Demonstrative kongruieren mit ihren Kopfnomina in Genus und Kasus, ihr Kasussystem ist jedoch auf die Unterscheidung von Nominativ, Akkusativ und Oblique beschränkt. Der zweite Teil des Artikels thematisiert die grammatischen Funktionen und die Semantik jedes einzelnen Kasus anhand elizitierter Sätze, Daten aus Texten und spontanen Äußerungen. Kasus ist das wichtigste Instrument, um die syntaktischen Abhängigkeiten im Satz zu markieren, da Kambaata keine Adpositionen hat. 1. Introduction <1> Kambaata is a Highland East Cushitic (HEC) language spoken by more than 600,000 speakers (Gordon 2005) about 300 km southwest of Addis Abeba in the Kambaata- Xambaaro-Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State, Ethiopia. It is mutually intelligible with its immediate relatives Alaaba and Qabeena. While the few works published on Kambaata so far more or less concentrate on the verbal morphology and on morpho-phonological processes (Abebe et al. 1985, M.G. Sim 1988, R.J. Sim 1988), little is known about the noun.
    [Show full text]
  • Dictionary Based Spelling Corrector System: the Case of Six Ethiopian Languages
    International Journal of Aquatic Science ISSN: 2008-8019 Vol 12, Issue 02, 2021 Dictionary Based Spelling Corrector System: The Case of Six Ethiopian Languages Wubetu Barud Demilie Department of Information Technology, Wachemo University, Hossana, Ethiopia, P.O. Box: 667 ABSTRACT A dictionary-based spelling correctorisa system that can directly identify what natural language is being dealt with and shifts to the proper spelling corrector for the languages that system users are interested to do so. Spelling corrector systems for languages would be used to check errors for any kind of spelling mistakes and are fairly reliant on the words in the lexicon dictionary. Some words may have very few words spelled similarly, so even numerous faults will recover the accurate word. Other words will have many likewise spelled words, so one error may make alteration problematic or unbearable. A dictionary- based model is used in noticing and modifying diverse classes of spelling errors. The main features of the planned model can be précised in giving the proposals for noticed errors and providing the correction automatically using the first suggestion. Furthermore, the planned model is calculated using dictionary-based data sets for all languages that the researcher has been selected for the study. This research work is based on a model dictionary-based which detects and corrects errors for six Ethiopian languages including Amharic, Afan Oromo, Tigrinya, Hadiyyisa, Kambatissa, and Awngi. The used corpora have been collected from balanced sources that contain economic, political, social, and related newspapers. Finally, after a successful evaluation of the proposed model, precision, recall, and f- measures have been calculated for each language.
    [Show full text]
  • Comparison in Kambaata: Superiority, Equality and Similarity Yvonne Treis
    Comparison in Kambaata: Superiority, Equality and Similarity Yvonne Treis To cite this version: Yvonne Treis. Comparison in Kambaata: Superiority, Equality and Similarity. Linguistic Discovery, Dartmouth College Library, 2018, On the expression of comparison: Contributions to the typology of comparative constructions from lesser-known languages (guest editors: Yvonne Treis & Katarzyna I. Wojtylak), 16 (1), pp.64-99. hal-01350812v3 HAL Id: hal-01350812 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01350812v3 Submitted on 3 Feb 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Comparison in Kambaata: Superiority, Equality and Similarity Yvonne Treis CNRS-LLACAN This paper is an in-depth study of the expression of comparison in Kambaata, a Highland East Cushitic language of Ethiopia. It discusses not only quantitative comparison, i.e. comparison of relative and absolute inequality and comparison of equality, but also analyses the morphology and syntax of expressions of qualitative comparison, i.e. comparison of similarity. Apart from predicative constructions, the analysis takes into account attributive comparative, superlative, equative and similative constructions. In the comparative construction (lit. ‘X is tall from Y’), the standard of comparison is marked by the ablative case, as in most languages spoken in the Horn of Africa.
    [Show full text]
  • LCSH Section K
    K., Rupert (Fictitious character) K-T boundary Ka-ju-ken-bo USE Rupert (Fictitious character : Laporte) USE Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary USE Kajukenbo K-4 PRR 1361 (Steam locomotive) K-TEA (Achievement test) Ka-La-Bre-Osh (Game) USE 1361 K4 (Steam locomotive) USE Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement USE Belote (Game) K-9 (Fictitious character) (Not Subd Geog) K-theory Kʻa-la-kʻun-lun kung lu (China and Pakistan) UF K-Nine (Fictitious character) [QA612.33] USE Karakoram Highway (China and Pakistan) K9 (Fictitious character) BT Algebraic topology Ka Lae o Kilauea (Hawaii) K 37 (Military aircraft) Homology theory USE Kilauea Point (Hawaii) USE Junkers K 37 (Military aircraft) NT Whitehead groups Ka Lang (Vietnamese people) K 98 k (Rifle) K. Tzetnik Award in Holocaust Literature USE Giẻ Triêng (Vietnamese people) USE Mauser K98k rifle UF Ka-Tzetnik Award Ka nanʻʺ (Burmese people) (May Subd Geog) K.A.L. Flight 007 Incident, 1983 Peras Ḳ. Tseṭniḳ [DS528.2.K2] USE Korean Air Lines Incident, 1983 Peras Ḳatseṭniḳ UF Ka tūʺ (Burmese people) K.A. Lind Honorary Award BT Literary prizes—Israel BT Ethnology—Burma USE Moderna museets vänners skulpturpris K2 (Pakistan : Mountain) ʾKa nao dialect (May Subd Geog) K.A. Linds hederspris UF Dapsang (Pakistan) BT China—Languages USE Moderna museets vänners skulpturpris Godwin Austen, Mount (Pakistan) Hmong language K-ABC (Intelligence test) Gogir Feng (Pakistan) Ka nō (Burmese people) USE Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children Mount Godwin Austen (Pakistan) USE Tha noʹ (Burmese people) K-B Bridge (Palau) BT Mountains—Pakistan Ka Rang (Southeast Asian people) USE Koro-Babeldaod Bridge (Palau) Karakoram Range USE Sedang (Southeast Asian people) K-BIT (Intelligence test) K2 (Drug) Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere (N.Z.) USE Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test USE Synthetic marijuana USE Franz Josef Glacier/Kā Roimata o Hine K.
    [Show full text]
  • Switch-Reference and Omotic-Cushitic Language Contact in Southwest Ethiopia
    Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 80–116 brill.nl/jlc Switch-reference and Omotic-Cushitic Language Contact in Southwest Ethiopia Yvonne Treis LLACAN (CNRS, INALCO), Villejuif, France [email protected] Abstract Africa has up until now been considered a continent where switch-reference systems are extremely rare. This study shows that there is a confined area in the South of Ethiopia where many Omotic languages and a few Cushitic languages have fully grammaticalised switch- reference systems on dependent (co-)subordinate non-final verbs, so-called converbs. The paper describes in detail the switch-reference system of Kambaata (Cushitic) and gives an overview of the distribution of switch-reference systems in Ethiopia in general. It is argued that switch- reference marking in Cushitic languages is the result of contact with neighbouring Omotic languages. Keywords switch-reference; converb; Cushitic; Omotic; borrowing; contact-induced grammaticalisation 1. Introduction Ethiopia is the home of languages that belong to three families of the Afroasiatic phylum, i.e. Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic languages. Along the Western border of Ethiopia, Nilo-Saharan languages of the Eastern Sudanic and Koman branches are spoken. The geographical area that this article is concerned with, i.e. the Southwestern corner of Ethiopia, is the linguistically most heterogeneous area of the country, where the majority of Omotic lan- guages, the Surmic (East Sudanic) languages and most small Cushitic and Semitic languages are spoken. Language contact research in Ethiopia has a long tradition and may be said to have started with Leslau’s work of 1945. Ferguson’s seminal paper of 1976 set the stage for the study of the Ethiopian Language Area.
    [Show full text]
  • Negation in Kambaata (Cushitic) Yvonne Treis
    Negation in Kambaata (Cushitic) Yvonne Treis To cite this version: Yvonne Treis. Negation in Kambaata (Cushitic). Matti Miestamo; Ljuba Veselinova. Negation in the languages of the world, Language Science Press, In press. hal-02332852v2 HAL Id: hal-02332852 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02332852v2 Submitted on 9 Nov 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Chapter 1 Negation in Kambaata (Cushitic) Yvonne Treis LLACAN (CNRS, INALCO) The Ethiopian language Kambaata (Cushitic) has five distinct negative inflectional suffixes that negate (i) declarative main verbs and non-verbal predicates, (ii)imper- atives, (iii) jussives and benedictives, (iv) converbs and (v) relative verbs. Affirma- tive and negative verb forms do not often match each other in a one-to-one relation, but paradigmatic and constructional asymmetries can be observed. Depending on the verb type, aspectual and modal distinctions are neutralized under negation, the number of different subject indexes is reduced, the distinction between same subject and different subject forms is lost, and changes occur in the morpholog- ical makeup of verb forms. Finally, not all affirmative paradigms have dedicated negative counterparts. Most noteworthy from a typological point of view are Kam- baata’s negative relative verbs.
    [Show full text]